I am running a 100tick srcds server for CS:S on a Fedora Core 4 box, spec:

Intel Celeron 2.66GHz
512MB RAM
10mbit unmetered network connection

The server is capped to 12 players, and there's normally around 8 players on it. The problem I'm having is that regardless of player count, everyone playing gets a lag spike whenever a player joins or leaves. It's twice as bad when someone rejoins, because there are 2 lag spikes in quick succession. I was wondering whether anything could be done about it. I'm thinking that the bottleneck in the machine spec is the RAM. Frustratingly the server runs smoothly except for the join/leave lag, so my guess is it lags when srcds swaps out memory so it can allocate more for the the newly joining player.

Any thoughts, or commands that you know of that might help to calm the spikes?

Sounds suspicious - but those specs *shouldn't* be causing that much problem. Do you run a custom kernel for >100fps server side? If not, you could recompile a 1000hz kernel and see what happens.

Might be an idea to try a full format of the HD and reinstall the OS with a vanilla kernel and see if the same problem occurs. If the problem still occurs, you could even try another kernel and if that fails.. then would probably need to update hardware.

But, those specs that you mentioned, shouldn't be causing lag spikes like that. I had a 2ghz P4 a while ago, same amount of ram with a 100mb unmetered line - no lag spikes.

Seems other people have been getting lag spikes with the 2.6.18 kernel (although not truely confirmed - just specualtion). They have said that downgrading to 2.6.8 or even 2.5.6 has sorted the problem for them.

The issue has only occurred recently (in the last few updates) so you could just wait it out and see as there has just been a new beta released which should hopefully sort all these problems.

Muppet Wrote:Seems other people have been getting lag spikes with the 2.6.18 kernel (although not truely confirmed - just specualtion). They have said that downgrading to 2.6.8 or even 2.5.6 has sorted the problem for them.

The issue has only occurred recently (in the last few updates) so you could just wait it out and see as there has just been a new beta released which should hopefully sort all these problems.

Yeah, it does seem to have come around recently - getting worse in the last week or so. I think I'll take your advice and wait till the next release to see if it's fixed before I do anything drastic.